I discovered a few days ago that I was, to put it technically, ‘overweight’. I have a new application on my iPad to control my Type 1 diabetes. The first time I entered my weight it creaked and started playing Jewel’s Fragile Flame (also known as Fat Boy). That’s the delight of high tech. It insults you with style.
But the software gave me an exact number to work with. My Body Mass Index was 28.7. The ‘normal’ range is between 18.5 and 25.
There are 3 methods to resolve this issue. The simplest is to grow 5 cm taller, and then you are back in range. In my case, that’s quite difficult to do, especially at the age of 53. Almost as difficult is to lose 15 kg (get my current weight from 95 kg to 80 kg, which seems the appropriate weight for my height.) So I chose the 3rd method: Do nothing.
There is a business point to this story, if you will bear with me a little longer.
Since I bought this product to get better control, I started measuring the numbers that are crucial to a person with diabetes. There is just one: Blood Glucose. It took a few days to see that what I was eating was not conducive for blood glucose control. So I began to change my habits.
Within a week I had lost 5 kg. (And my glucose numbers now look fresh and smell of lemon.)
Now, before you yell at me because we are all experts on nutrition, having spent so much time fighting with these issues, and you feel I might be losing weight little too fast, and that if I chose the Foster-Alan Synchronised Amino-Apothecary Baltic Sea regime instead, I could do much better, remember that this story is about business, not my personal quest to go to heaven via airmail instead of road freight in a large box.
The simple act of measuring the numbers led me to start thinking about what they meant, and how to improve them. And thinking about them made it easy for me to change what I was doing. This was science, rather than opinion. The fact that these numbers ‘happen’ every few hours remains a constant nudge.
That’s the thing about business that I find so fascinating. Most of us are too busy to measure the numbers vital to our own efforts. There is an apocryphal story about a department store owner in the United States about 100 years ago who famously proclaimed “half of my advertising money is goes to waste, but I don’t know which half”.
Most of us still do our advertising and marketing with that same level of measurement. In the Internet marketing world we have it much easier because we can actually measure results. And we do, ad nauseam. At some point in the next few months somebody is going to call you and tell you that they can get 100 clicks to your website for the paltry sum of R2000 (unless you take today’s discount of R1000) provided you sign a 12 month contract. (I am being a little cynical, but you get the point.)
A “click” is what happens when somebody is searching for what you sell, sees your advert, and clicks on it, finally ending up on your site. The concept is wonderful. In practice, 100 clicks won’t usually give you better than one enquiry. In fact, most of the time it will give you no enquiries. That’s because your website wasn’t designed to ask for enquiries. Most of our websites are designed to tell people about ourselves and our businesses.
In fact, most websites are about as effective at getting enquiries as my blood glucose software is for controlling bees in the basement.
I am a salesman, not a techie. Clicks are meaningless. Enquiries are a much better measure of how effective your Internet marketing is. But the true measure, the platinum standard, is the number of those enquiries that turn into sales.
Because a sale is not just a one night stand. It is the beginning of a lifetime relationship. And for most of us, the lifetime value of a client is almost immeasurable. It’s not just the money they give us when they buy what we sell. It’s that they continue to buy. And they talk to their friends about us. And if they like us enough they will tell us what we are doing wrong rather than leave and buy elsewhere.
I found this out over the past two weeks when we launched a new venture. We expected to take on 10 partners. We ended up interviewing more than 60, and taking on 42. 41 of these were existing clients, or previous clients, and many dated back to the mid-nineties. Your clients are the only real asset your business has.
Bottom line: If you want something to change in your life, start measuring the right things.